Posts Tagged ‘obama

So I know this is a couple of days old, but it’s something hilarious I think everyone should see. When Obama took office, I remember thinking to myself that his type of diplomacy might be just what’s needed to maybekindasorta bring some kind of peace to the Middle East. And when he recently met with Abbas and told him that the U.S. backs a two-state solution 100%, I was both surprised and heartened that a breakthrough might be made…BUT, I was also curious how Israel would react to a leader of the U.S. not giving them everything they want when they want it.

“The American demand to prevent natural growth is unreasonable, and brings to mind pharaoh, who said, ‘Every son that is born you shall cast into the river,'” Science and Technology Minister Daniel Herschkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi) said.

Anyway, I am going on the record now to say I will personally assume the debt our stimulus package will accrue, if only these are on the menu:

Because a good hot dog = world peace on a bun.

This actually reminds me of a joke. Two Iranian friends arrive on American shores on the 4th of July. They are both excited to assimilate as quickly as possible, and make a bet to meet one year later to see who’s done a better job. The next year, they meet up as planned. The first man says, “I just came from a big barbecue at my neighbor’s house, where we ate a ton of hamburgers and hot dogs, then played frisbee and watched fireworks. Pretty American, right?”

So I’m well aware that I have been silent of late. And it’s because…well, the news has been kind of depressing. The revelation that the pictures Obama didn’t release show rapes performed by the military…well, specifically, the rape of a young boy by a translator in front of imprisoned women just sent me into a nauseous tailspin, from which I have yet to fully recover (no Saltines or ginger ale in Spain).
Boy howdy, was I glad to come across this gem, courtesy of a (gasp!) conservative Christian site out of our favorite hillbilly dumpster, Wasilla!

In answering this question [about whether or not the Antichrist will be a homosexual], it is important to assert the question does not originate with me,

Oh, joy! Only the very best in wing-nuttery begins with a disclaimer!

[H]omosexuality is a modern word invented to replace the word Noah Webster did include, sodomy, defined as a crime against nature.

Uh oh, those Saddlebacking kids are in for a surprise when the end of days gets here…

Having seen what the Bible says of sodomy, we have no further to look than the book of Daniel, chapter 11 to find our answer. It says, “Neither shall he [Antichrist] regard… the desire of women….” As I said at the onset, I am not the first to draw attention to this, but the verbiage is clear.

Ooh, bookending disclaimers! This guy really wants to sound like an unbiased authority!

The time is ripe for such a leader. Indeed, it should not be surprising that the one who is against everything Biblical and Christian should be a partaker of so great a sin; there is no greater way to reject the Creator than to reject your gender and his design for it. And at what other time have we seen such perversion come out of the closets onto our streets, threatening violence if we do not accept their ways?

Is it any wonder that Revelation 13 says that this same Antichrist will make war with the saints of the tribulation, and overcome them? Are they not now readying themselves to make it illegal to “offend” them in any way, calling it hatred to preach against their sin? Is it because they love us? The time is ripe for such a man.

I’d go through and dispute the charges, but…well, it’s just so fucking stupid, why bother marring the purity of his own words with facts?

So I’m losing patience with the left. Or, as it is more normally typed on the internet,

DEMKRAT SOSHULIST MUSLINS IS ROONING OUR CUNTRY!!!1!!!1111!

Here’s the thing: I’m quite far left. However, having worked for long enough in serious-minded activism (meaning not just mindlessly chanting outside buildings, or joining angry-sounding Facebook groups…the stuff I do now), I know certain realities of society and the way it has to work in order to affect change. Here is the lesson I learned:

Politics. Is. Compromise.

In other words, there is no politics without a coalition. And there is no coalition without compromise.

I spent this morning watching the MSNBC pundits and civil libertarians of the web getting all frothy at the mouth about Obama’s speech. I subsequently spent the day depressed, the references to the movie “Minority Report” dancing in my head just the way sugarplums wouldn’t. And then I took a breath (meaning, a glass of wine), sat down, and read the more mainstream liberal media, which reminded me that my initial suspicions had indeed been correct:

The speech last night wasn’t perfect, for us hippies, but it was perfect for a politician.

Yes, “indefinite detention” is…well, troublesome. Verrrry troublesome. However, the beauty of this President is that, not only does he know that, but he tries to address the concerns of the very people in whose clubhouse he used to play (Constitutional Law geeks, many of whom attended an off-the-record meeting at the White House the day before the speech). Better yet, he’s man enough to take the Bush comparisons from them directly, then not give ground.

Lest I be accused of being a shallow idealogue, let’s imagine for a second that Obama didn’t even entertain the idea of overriding Habeus Corpus for any reason, ‘kay? What would that mean? It would mean that Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be out of prison tomorrow (all evidence against them being tainted by the torture they experienced. As Law and Order has taught me for 63 years now, fruit of a poisoned tree is always just that). I, personally, have little problem with that release, as a strict admirer of our civil liberties, and would even see it as a harbinger of a new dawn.

However…

Anyone remember Willie Horton? Of course you do. He was the death knell of Dukakis’ career. And he was NOTHING, scandal-wise, compared to these two high-ranking Al Qaeda officials.

Do any members of the ACLU realistically think anyone (no matter how sparkly or miraculously beloved) who effectively pardons the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks for that crime will ever get elected to office ever?

And what if that weren’t the problem? What if society accepted that we are bound by the current legal system and therefore have to let these guys go? Would it then be a huge surprise to see a populist uprising occur against said existing legal system? Maybe a reversal of our current policies, which favor the rights of one wrongly-accused man over those of many guilty ones, towards the Napoleonic approach?

So, yes, I’m sad about the compromising Obama’s having to do. But it’s necessary, and it’s something that all people have to do in order to get along with other people (Ever have to put in a lunch order for a group at an office? Try finding a restaurant everyone likes/can afford if you’re ordering for millions.). And I’ll continue to commiserate in spirit with my beloved civil libertarian blogger friends, all of whom are necessary and consequential in their dissent, their rage, and their articulation of both (cause, hey, the president reads!). I’ll drink cheap wine, curse reality, and toast the death of my Unicorn King POTUS.

Let’s hope the Obama administration really does, as is rumored, read Andrew Sullivan. His column on Obama’s gay rights bullshit no-stances is powerful stuff, and everyone should read it. Which is why I’m going to post it in its entirety:

The Fierce Urgency Of Whenever

I lived through eight years of the Clintons and then eight years of Bush. Through it all, gay people were treated at the federal level like embarrassments or impediments. With Clinton, we were the means to raise money. With Bush, we were the means to leverage votes by exploiting bigotry. Obama seemed in the campaign to promise something else. I listened to him in the early days and found him sincere about ending discrimination by the government; and I came to respect, while vehemently disagreeing with, his position on federal civil unions. He seemed genuinely distressed that gay servicemembers should be treated with contempt and persecution by their commander-in-chief, that gay couples should have to fight for basic human treatment – like entry to hospital rooms, or being able to stay in the same apartment as their late spouse, or forced into cruel separation by immigration laws that treat gay couples as threats, rather than assets, or if you had the temerity to survive HIV, being treated at the US border the way Jesse Helms always wanted people with HIV to be treated – like perverts and pariahs and threats.

It is quite something to have a government stamp in your passport, as I do, that will tell any immigration or police officer with a connection to a government database that I have HIV, that I am therefore a threat and can be arrested and detained and deported at the border if necessary. I’m a big boy with money and a robust self-esteem as an HIV-positive survivor, but I think of thousands of others far less powerful and wealthy than I am who are afraid to enter or leave the US because their HIV status renders them criminals. I think of how the US is the only developed country – and one of only a handful of undeveloped countries – that still tells the world that people with HIV are dangerous pariahs, who need policing at borders and deporting if discovered. And yet this is the current policy of the Obama administration on global HIV and AIDS.

And it’s tedious to whine and jump up and down and complain when a wand isn’t waved and everything is made right by the first candidate who really seemed to get it, who was even able to address black church congregations about homophobia. And obviously patience is necessary; and legislative work takes time; and there are real challenges on so many fronts, especially the economy and the legacy of war crimes and the permanently restive Iraqi and Afghan regions we are constantly in the process of liberating from themselves. No one expects a president to be grappling with all this early on, or, God help us, actually leading on civil rights. That’s our job, not his.

But I have a sickeningly familiar feeling in my stomach, and the feeling deepens with every interaction with the Obama team on these issues. They want them to go away. They want us to go away.

Here we are, in the summer of 2009, with gay servicemembers still being fired for the fact of their orientation. Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options (unlike most non-Americans with HIV who have no options at all).

And what is Obama doing about any of these things? What is he even intending at some point to do about these things? So far as I can read the administration, the answer is: nada. We’re firing Arab linguists? So sorry. We won’t recognize in any way a tiny minority of legally married couples in several states because they’re, ugh, gay? We had no idea. There’s a ban on HIV-positive tourists and immigrants? Really? Thanks for letting us know. Would you like to join Joe Solmonese and John Berry for cocktails? The inside of the White House is fabulous these days.

Yesterday, Robert Gibbs gave non-answer after non-answer on civil unions and Obama’s clear campaign pledge to grant equal federal rights for gay couples; non-answer after non-answer on the military’s remaining ban on honest servicemembers. What was once a categorical pledge is now – well let’s call it the toilet paper that it is. I spent yesterday trying to get a better idea of what’s intended on all fronts, and the overwhelming sense – apart from a terror of saying anything about gay people on the record – is that we are in the same spot as in every Democratic administration: the well-paid leaders of the established groups get jobs and invites, and that’s about it. Worse: we will get a purely symbolic, practically useless hate crimes bill that they will then wave in our faces to prove they need do nothing more.

As for the HIV ban, legislatively lifted by overwhelming numbers of Republicans and Democrats almost a year ago, this is the state of play from an Obama HHS spokesman:

“The Department of Health and Human Services has submitted for OMB review a notice of proposed rule-making to implement this change.”

Translation: we’re doing the bare minimum to make us look no worse than Bush, but we have no real interest in this and are letting the bureaucracy handle it, and we guarantee nothing. On gay servicemembers, the president is writing personal notes to those he has fired and intends to continue firing. Will he write some personal notes to the people with HIV he deports? Will he write personal notes to the gay spouses suddenly without a home or their late spouse’s savings or forced by his administration to relocate abroad because he has no intention of actually fulfilling his promises?

I recall my old, now dead, friend Bob Hattoy, who toiled in the Clinton administration. He was going to write a memoir of working with people who thought of homosexual rights as wonderful things to say you support (especially if you’re fundraising or at a Hollywood dinner party) but far, far too controversial to ever do anything about, let alone risk anything for. In the end, of course, the Clintons enacted a slew of brutally anti-gay measures – passing DOMA, doubling the rate of gay discharges from the military, signing the ban on HIV-positive tourists and immigrants – and expected standing ovations as pioneers of civil rights. The pathetic gay rights leaders gave it to them, so delighted were they to have their checks cashed. The proposed title of Bob’s book was a summary of the priorities of the Clinton years:

It’s The Economy, Faggot.

I have a feeling he died laughing. What else are you gonna do?

I agree 100%. Gay rights are civil rights. Period. Using a community’s desperation to only be partially marginalized and discriminated against (as opposed to forcibly extricated from “polite society”) in order to get elected is disgusting. Especially for beneficiaries of the movement. And I’m not just talking Obama here: Women, Jews, Catholics, all minorities, and sometimes majorities…we all benefit together, or perish alone.

It had to happen: The revelation that John Edwards’ campaign was always going to be an epic failure (whether the voters wanted it that way or not) had prompted pus-weeping swamp toad, Mark Penn, to speculate that, had Edwards been honorable and dropped out before Iowa, Hillary would be POTUS and Obama would be back washing dishes “where he belongs” in Chicago. Of course, he’s ignoring the fact that, had Edwards been honorable about anything ever in his rotten life, he probably wouldn’t have fucked around on his dying wife, then made her parade around saying what a great guy he is. But I digress.

So, anyway, it looks like that set the pollsters to work, and they’ve concluded many, many things, all of which point to Hillary never having a chance against Obama with or without Edwards. Specifically, in Iowa, a state Mark Penn swears up and down Hillary would have won without Edwards’ name on the ballot:

The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, taken in the closing days of the caucus campaign, showed that in fact Obama was the second choice of more Edwards supporters than Clinton was. The numbers? Among Edwards’ supporters, 41 percent said Obama was their second choice, compared to 25 percent who said Clinton was their second choice.

Sorry, Penn and PUMAs everywhere, but there it is in black and white: God hates ugly. The end.

No one knows what the hell is going on in Obama’s mind most of the time. I like to think it’s a rosy, haloed montage of kittens, all viewed through the thick haze of nicotine with Al Green in the background (Honestly, how the hell does he stay so cool in the midst of all this shit?). So it’s not too often that the entirety of the mainstream media comes to the same conclusion about the same thing. This, however, is one of those times: When it comes to replacing David Souter, Obama’s looking for a coupla good X chromosomes, preferably bien caliente.

Normally I hate this shit. I really do. I hate the idea of either giving or denying someone a job based on their genitalia, and I’ve fought against that idea for the entirety of my riot grrrl-y life. This time, however, I think an exception has to be made.

What the hell is going on with the Supreme Court? How in the sam hell can a court, which is supposed to rule on the most important issues concerning the American populous, be so ridiculously non-indicative of said populace? One woman? No Latinos? How the fuck can 50.7% and 14.4% of the population be represented by less than 1% and 0% of Supreme Court justices, respectively?

Yeah, so, I hate to admit it, but the general consensus is not only likely correct, but needs to be likely correct.

The GOP may now resume its red-alert terror campaign against whatever imaginary Latina is dancing in their minds (Sonia Sotomayor).